Stuff

Several weeks ago Richard and I determined that it was time to sell the New York piede a terre.  Mounting maintenance fees, declining use made the decision obvious.  Yesterday he and a friend drove a van from New York to Sarasota filled with what we deemed salvageable, mostly paintings, a few clothes (mine), and unaccountably a small dining room table which as I look at it here, I am not so sure.  But then I have yet to open the eight or so black plastic bags I filled with what I thought were essentials, not mention what Richard must have swept up, governed by his family's reluctance to throw anything away in his impoverished youth.  There they sit in the living room of the guest apartment while his fellow driver sleeps peacefully in the room next.  I haven't had a chance to assess the projected changes to the hang of the art collection in the two units.  We have a lot of art on the walls. In the last moves from Cambridge to Hull to Sarasota we deaccessioned is what I believe they say an awful lot of stuff.  Richard has time and again stood manfully with nails and hammer as I slowly, painfully create a wall arrangement that requires him to make tiresome adjustments a little here a little there and this most impatient of men never complains.  That is true love and devotion!  Looming further along the summer's calendar is the arrival every Thursday of a professional organizer who will finally help me pare down for the end days.  After eighty five I read over and over again--but, hey, I haven't read Jane Brody on the subject so can it be true?--anyway, after eighty five a person is off the charts, and should I guess be winding down.  Anyway, I have engaged a most engaging young woman who will come on Thursdays during July and go through my closets, my drawers, my bookcases, my desk and we will make the final choices.  For instance, I could not somehow bear to throw out my favorite ten sport jackets, an item of clothing I rarely put on down here and especially because most despite being thin have synthetic fabric linings which hold the body heat and in Florida are more or less useless.  Always in search of the perfect shoe for my crippled feet I have amassed a stockpile of them.  Well, I could go on and on, but that is what I am now processing, as they say, the hard choices that lie ahead, to which I will be forced by a charming, intelligent young woman with no skin in the game.  Perfect!  But first my daughter arrives for the weekend, we go south for a half hour to the first birthday celebration of my great granddaughter and I assume patriarch mode for a few hours, then we're off to Pittsburgh to visit newly resident old friends there and see Falling Water and the Andy Warhol museum.  We are looking forward to this.  We hope it will lift the gloom into which the events in Orlando have plunged us all, the outright sorrow for all those dead young people, so atrociously killed, the obscene political use Trump and others will make of this human tragedy, the shockingly brutal remark of the father that his son lost his mind at the sight of his infant child witnessing two men romantically kissing, as though that were just exactly the normal motive anyone would need to shoot up a room full of gay males.